Famine, Not Genocide

Adrian Karatnycky's March 5 op-ed "The Great Memory Purge" is itself not free of the distortions of history that it condemns in contemporary Russia.

His assertion that there were more than five million deaths in Ukraine as a result of the 1932-33 famine is probably a substantial exaggeration. His statement that it had "genocide as its aim" is one that seems to me quite wrong. Even though some of the victims were probably the result of a deliberate killing policy and the death toll could have been...